My Brother's Keeper

Chapter 20



WEDNESDAY 28 NOVEMBER 2012

You’d have to be crazy not to be scared landing at Wellington airport on a windy day, and my way of dealing with fear is to be pissed off. Psychiatrists would have a field day with stuff like that but, honestly, there’s something manifestly wrong when passengers applaud the captain just for landing the plane. Surely landing the plane isn’t an optional extra that deserves praise.

My foul mood hung around like a bad smell. Even the taxi driver didn’t try to engage me in conversation. This was a first. Chats with taxi drivers were often a highlight of my day. In my perversely honest heart I knew the roller-coaster plane landing wasn’t the cause of my bad mood, though it hadn’t helped. What was bothering me was the close escape I’d had with Ned. The dilemma now was whether I needed to tell Robbie about it. I took a break from my angst to carefully turn my munted phone back on. Two voice messages had been left during the flight. The first was from the real-estate agent, Jason. He started right in, pointing out that this was the second message he had left asking me to contact him ASAP. He used the acronym again. He was the only person I had ever heard do that. My mouth was still working on a response when the second message started up.

‘It’s me. Sunny,’ she said, barely controlling the panic in her voice. ‘Dad’s been arrested. I don’t know who else to call. Please ring me. Please!’

I immediately pressed the dial icon, careful not to dislodge the shattered glass. The call went straight to voicemail. Justin arrested? Fanshaw had convinced me Justin wasn’t responsible for Karen’s death; assured me his alibi had checked out — thoroughly. What the hell had happened to change the cops’ minds? An awful thought occurred to me: maybe Fanshaw told me Justin had checked out just to keep me out of their way. I blushed at the idea of it. If this was so, it was a pretty clear indication the police had lost confidence in me and I had little hope of getting any future work with them. I would have to hang up my missing persons operator boots and do something else for a living. Justin was arrested for Karen’s murder — well, it was what I had suspected. He hadn’t wanted Karen back in his daughter’s life and there was no doubt he was very protective of Sunny. I’d experienced that first hand. How he had got himself to Wellington, killed Karen and made his way back to Auckland in time to take Sunny to the wharf for the meeting puzzled me. No doubt all would become clear.

Sunny’s call had taken my mind off my own personal dilemma: was I obliged to tell Robbie about my near miss with Ned? As the taxi pulled into the curb and my house came into view, I made a decision. I was being way too serious about the whole thing. Sure, I’d tell Robbie about Ned. Why not? I’d turn it into a story, make a joke of it, cast myself as foolishly swooning for the rakish charms of a flirtatious Irishman. I’d assure Robbie nothing had happened. Because nothing had happened. Ned had held my foot, that’s all. Cupped my sorry ankle, to be precise. There was no reason at all why I should feel guilty about that. I’d done nothing wrong; in fact, I decided, as I lugged my overnight bag up the path, I’d tell Robbie about Ned straight away. Get it over with. He’d wind me up a bit, we’d have a laugh and that would be the end of it.

Robbie was drinking coffee at the kitchen table. Wolf lay across his feet. A bunch of yellow tulips wrapped in white paper lay on the bench. I stalled in the doorway, my mouth ready to deliver the silly story about me and Ned. Robbie stood, his smile already hitched. Wolf dragged himself off Robbie’s feet and arthritically clicked his way towards me. It wasn’t anything like his usual excited greeting. My mouth opened and closed. Robbie’s beautiful smile slowly unhitched. I didn’t have to tell him anything. One look at me and he knew. And just like that I realised why I had been in such a foul mood. Ned may have been the cause or the effect but, either way, my relationship with Robbie was in deep shit. It had taken me all this time to acknowledge it. Robbie knew it instantly. Into the awkward silence that lengthened between us, I garbled something about having to go straight back to Auckland, deciding on the spot it was what I needed to do.

‘There’s a problem there,’ I said, excruciatingly aware there was a problem right here, too.

‘You do what you have to do, Di,’ he said quietly, and took his cup and saucer to the bench. He placed them carefully in the sink and stayed like that, his head bowed, breathing slowly.

I felt the tears threatening. ‘I can ask Gemma to look after Wolf … if you’d rather.’

My voice seemed to waken him from his thoughts. He shrugged himself into his jacket.

‘No, it’s fine,’ he said, laying an index finger on Wolf’s nose. ‘We’re fine, eh boy?’ I watched the hairs on the top of Wolf’s head rise in response. I think mine did too. I envied the intimacy of that touch. He moved into the doorway where I was still stalled. ‘I’ll pick him up after work.’ He paused long enough to run cool fingertips gently down my face. ‘You’ll be gone,’ he said.

Wolf followed Robbie outside and stayed there watching him drive away. Okay, it’s official: I’m a shit girlfriend; a shit dog owner; a shit missing persons so-called expert; a shit everything. Shit! Wolf didn’t disagree with me one bit. Once Robbie was out of sight, he walked back inside without so much as an affectionate lean on his way past. I followed meekly, determined not to plead or make a craven idiot of myself in any other way. Wolf slumped back down on the floor where Robbie’s feet had been and let out a deep sigh. Fine. Be like that. There was a sheet of paper on the table I hadn’t noticed until now. It bore the letterhead of Jason’s real-estate agency and was headed ‘Offer on Sale of House’. I skimmed down the page until I got to a number: $860,000. I held the paper up close to my face and counted those zeros again. An eight hundred and sixty thousand dollar offer. It was fifty thousand more than Jason thought we’d get at auction. It should have made me feel good.

My newly independent-minded phone had turned itself off again. When I rebooted it, there was another panicked message from Sunny asking me to please, please, please ring her. When I tried, all I got was her voicemail again. Making true what I had told Robbie, I booked a flight back to Auckland, closing my eyes while the website confirmed my credit card payment. I knew I was perilously close to my limit but I couldn’t work up the courage to check exactly how close. Departing at six o’clock meant I had only a couple of hours to do everything I needed to before heading to the airport. I put my recalcitrant phone on the charger and used the landline to ring Jason. He confirmed the offer on the house was genuine and still live, whatever that meant. If he was expecting a squeal of delight he must have been disappointed. I said I’d give him an answer by the same time tomorrow. He started to remonstrate with me but I hung up. Then I rang Sean and matter-of-factly told him what the offer was.

‘Wow. That’s more than I expected,’ he said, his voice pleased.

‘Yeah. It’s definitely a good offer.’

‘So, what do you think?’ he said, failing to suppress the excitement in his voice.

I squeezed my eyes shut tight. ‘I think we should take it.’



‘Okay,’ he said, a little too quickly. ‘As long as you’re …’ he hesitated, ‘if you think so.’ I knew he was trying to let it be my decision and I appreciated that. ‘Do you want to grab a coffee or something?’ he said. ‘It would be good to talk.’

‘I can’t, sorry. I’m flying back to Auckland this afternoon. But listen, Sean. It’s okay. I’m okay about it. You were right. It’s time to sell up.’

‘Actually, Di, it wasn’t the house I wanted to talk to you about.’

I waited, feeling oddly detached while he struggled to find his opening line. Wolf still lay on the phantom of Robbie’s feet. He had turned his back to me, maintaining an unmistakable posture. Who needs teenagers when you’ve got a dog with attitude?

‘Are you and Robbie going to move in together?’

I wasn’t expecting this. ‘What?’ Wolf’s ears pricked with interest at my raised voice.

‘Robbie’s a great guy, you know.’

I tried for a second ‘What?’ but nothing came out.

‘I’d hate for you to stuff it up, that’s all.’

Finally my outraged voice made it all the way past my throat. ‘What the f*ck’s it got to do with you?’

‘Don’t be like that, Diane. I just wanted to say, Robbie’s a great guy and you’re a great, um … woman.’ He ignored my snort and pressed on. ‘You two are good together.’

I sucked in some air and kept my voice steady and quiet. ‘Go f*ck yourself, Sean,’ I said, keeping it friendly. We breathed intimately into the silence some more, our breaths mingling in a way they hadn’t for a very long time.



‘Bye,’ I said, and hung up.

It took only a twenty-minute hobbling walk along the lower track of Mt Victoria and the occasional lower back scratch and I had Wolf eating out of my hand again. Literally. Smackos will win over the most standoffish of dogs. Tragic, really. I picked up a pine cone, a young one, firm and closed with a shiny golden sheen the colour of its needles, and lobbed it up the slope. Wolf and I watched it roll back towards us. He glanced at me then continued to breathe deeply at the bottom of a rotted tree trunk. Chasing pine cones has never interested Wolf much. Neither had running round in circles chasing his own tail. That was my specialty.

By the time I was back home re-packing my bag, Wolf and I were best buddies again. He even awarded me his most loving of gestures, a surreptitious lick to the inside back of my knee. I bet he wouldn’t mention that little intimacy to Robbie. The knee laceration worried him and he spent some minutes sniffing a diagnosis, while I tried ringing Sunny’s number again. But what with my useless phone continuing to turn itself off and Sunny’s always flicking to voicemail we didn’t make any voice-to-voice contact. Justin’s arrest would have come as a complete shock to her. As far as I knew, she had no inkling that her father was a suspect for Karen’s murder; in fact, she didn’t even know Karen had been murdered. It was a relief when my phone finally rang. I thumbed the answer icon and tentatively held the phone six inches from my head. When the shattered screen did eventually drop out, I didn’t want it falling into my ear.

‘I’m Manny Spears,’ the voice said. ‘Karen Mackie’s friend.’ He made it sound like he was her only friend. ‘I want to talk to you.’ This was a bonus. Tracking down the friend Karen had been planning to go to the commune with had been top of my to-do list. ‘Can we meet?’ he said. ‘I want to talk face to face. I don’t like phones.’

I had two hours before I needed to be at the airport. A gust of wind buffeting the house reminded me of what to expect at takeoff.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘What are you doing now?’

Manny arrived less than fifteen minutes later. Giving a stranger my home address is not something I would normally do, but already it felt more like a house than my home. No doubt in preparation for it being sold, I was separating myself from it ASAP, as Jason would say.

Wolf went through his usual theatrical routine with strangers while Manny stood in the doorway: head bent, eyes averted, weighing him up like an old enemy. The prison tattoo on his hands and cheekbone reinforced my suspicion he’d had run-ins with Wolf’s compatriots in the past. Normally I’d tell Wolf to rein in his performance, but this time I let him go the full three acts. After a few days separation from me, he needed to reassert his role in our relationship, and it didn’t hurt for this stranger to know I had an ex-police dog in the room on full alert. Wolf turned on a top-notch performance, baring his teeth and raising his neck hair. I almost forgot myself and applauded. When he had finished announcing his full credentials, I instructed him to stay by the door and offered Manny a coffee.

‘I’ll take a seat but I won’t take up your offer of a drink, thank you,’ he said, and lowered himself tentatively into the chair furthest from the door. He stole furtive glances at Wolf but kept his eyes out of reach of mine. Once seated, he slid a hand into a pocket and extracted a soft-leather black book. It looked suspiciously like a Bible. I didn’t notice any change in Wolf, but it sure made my hackles rise. Manny made no reference to it, but kept the book squeezed tightly in his palm. The cut in my knee oozed blood as I lowered myself into a chair opposite him. ‘What can I do for you, Manny?’ If he started to preach at me, I’d set Wolf on him.

‘Karen liked you. She thought she could trust you. Thought you were straight up.’ He shifted in his seat, uncomfortable. ‘I want to meet Sunny. Karen’s daughter. I want you to arrange it.’

Tiny blisters of sweat formed on his upper lip. It was hard to tell if it was me or Wolf causing them. Maybe neither. The simple act of conversing seemed to be a real strain. He had a past, this man. An unpleasant one.

‘I don’t think I can do that, Manny.’

For the first time he lifted his eyes to mine. I saw the sweat bead on his forehead with the effort. ‘I know how I look with the prison tattoos and all and some folk can’t see past them. I don’t blame them for that.’ He’d reached his limit of comfortable eye contact and turned to look out the window. A fine drizzle slurred the glass. ‘I marked myself as a criminal so the world would know it and I have to live with the consequences of that.’ His hand squeezed the Bible, tightly clutched beneath four white knuckles riddled with tattoos. ‘But this has left more of a mark on me than any ink could.’

I remained unmoved by the Bible, but Manny’s use of it as an emotional anchor was real enough. ‘Why do you want to see Sunny?’

He struggled with some inner argument before deciding, ‘I can’t tell you that.’

His eyes darted around the room and returned to touch down on Wolf. Possibly he was looking for an escape route that didn’t involve passing my dog. Wolf kept his unblinking stare fixed on Manny. His milky blind eye appeared all-seeing.

I relented. ‘If there’s something you want me to give Sunny, something of Karen’s, I can do that for you.’ This was a big offer on my part. The Bible he was clutching was most likely what he intended to offer and I wasn’t keen on being the gift-bearer of it.

‘It’s nothing like that,’ he said, frowning at the floorboards. His whole body was stiff with tension. ‘Karen already organised all that. With us preparing to go away and everything.’

He stalled. ‘Karen had come into quite a bit of money recently,’ I prompted. ‘When her mother died.’ I posed it as a statement, unsure how much he knew.

Manny threw me a quick glance. ‘She kept that pretty quiet, especially while she was still inside. It can be dangerous if word gets out that you’ve got money stashed away.’

‘Is it possible word did get out? And that’s what got her killed?’

He thought about the question for a long time, turning the Bible over and over in his hands like worry beads. ‘We were giving up everything we had anyway. It’s one of the rules of the commune. If it was her money they were after, well, that would be a …’ he struggled to rein in his emotion. ‘Well, that would be a crying shame now, wouldn’t it.’ He stopped, his voice thick. Out of respect, I looked away. Untethered from my gaze, he continued. ‘Karen didn’t need anything. Except God, of course,’ he added matter-of-factly. ‘Prison teaches you that. As for me, well, I’ve never had much anyway. Giving it up is not as big a deal as you’d think.’

‘You’re still going to the commune?’

‘Aye. As soon as I’ve sorted things for Sunny.’ His jaw clenched in determination. Whatever Karen had feared for Sunny, she’d passed on that concern to Manny. I leaned forward, trying to catch his eye again. ‘Do you think Sunny’s in danger, Manny?’

He looked at me directly. ‘Aye.’

‘Then tell me what it is. I’ll help. I won’t drag you into it.’

He closed his eyes and shook his head. ‘I gave my word.’

He had retreated from me. Lips moving in silent prayer, he stroked the leather with his thumb, smoothing out the corners. There was a fine filigree of gold tracing the edges. His unconscious stroking gesture was an old learned one. At sometime in his life Manny had calmed animals. I let my frustration with him go.

‘Well, I’m sorry, Manny. I can’t help you.’

There was no way I was going to let him Bible-bash Sunny, particularly now with her father arrested for her mother’s murder. She was vulnerable, a prime candidate to get sucked into anything on offer. ‘I keep my clients’ information confidential. That’s the deal. Karen knew that when she hired me.’

We had reached an impasse. I stood, an indication there was nothing more we could say.



Neck bent, Manny frowned at the floor for a long time, breathing heavily through his teeth. He ran his hand repeatedly over the pliable leather as if he was kneading shiny pasta dough.

‘I’m the only one who can give it to her,’ he repeated.

If I had been wavering, his sudden intensity convinced me. Wolf felt the tension build and rose to his full height, letting out a high-pitched whine of displeasure. Manny’s chair screeched painfully as he pushed it back. Wolf moved rapidly. Pushing in front of me, he pressed protectively against my legs, a low rumble of discontent vibrating against my damaged knee. Manny wasn’t the eye-popping, muscle-bulging gym type but he had an intensity that hummed with strength. I looped my finger lightly through Wolf’s collar. I would release him if Manny made even the slightest move towards me.

As quickly as he’d coiled, Manny relaxed. ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have expected less. You shouldn’t be putting someone you don’t know in touch with that little girl.’ He reached his hand across the table to me and when I eventually took it, he squeezed mine with convincing force. ‘Could you ask your dog to let me leave unmolested, please?’ he asked politely.

‘He won’t attack unless I tell him to,’ I said confidently, and put my hand flat on Wolf’s head to remind him of it.

Manny walked slowly to the door, his shoulders hunched, the Bible clutched in front of his body. The holy book might have effectively warded off any number of dangers but not Wolf. He was most definitely an atheist. The only god Wolf paid homage to was the heaven of late-afternoon sun on his pelt, the sacred smell of a bitch in season and the state of ecstasy reached after long hours gnawing on a bone.

Manny lifted his collar against the drizzling rain and bobbed his head in farewell, all the time keeping his eyes lowered. I was sure his aversion to eye contact was nothing more sinister than a symptom of his shyness.

For Karen’s sake I tried one last time. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t help you, Manny. Are you sure you won’t let me give something to Sunny for you?’

For the first time he smiled at me. A transforming smile, all sloped around one side of his face. ‘No, girl. It’s not something you can give her.’

He was halfway down the path when I called out. ‘Manny.’ He turned. ‘What time did you leave Karen’s place on Friday?’

‘The police have already asked me that.’ I bet they had. Many times, no doubt. He paused, hoping it would be enough for me. It wasn’t. ‘I left around nine-thirty. We were going to have a prayer session, but she was too excited about meeting her little girl the next day so we called it an early night.’

He lifted his hand in a silent farewell, turned his back and continued down the path. Only when he was completely out of sight did I breathe properly again. His tension had been infectious.

Arohata Women’s Prison is laid out a bit like an army barracks with one long single-storey wooden building serving both as dining room and visiting area. My visitor’s permit was already on file from the last time I was here; to hear Vex describe the details of my sister’s murder. I remembered it word for word. I could still hear the thrumming of a desperate bumblebee against the window, the background noise to her confession; could still picture it, image by image. An unexpected tsunami of grief threatened to engulf me. I held it back but the effort made my eyes sting.

Having previously been vetted, this time I only had to turn up, show my ID, endure a pat-down and relinquish my phone. The warder on entrance security studied my shattered mobile suspiciously but made no comment other than a derisive snort. She had the same response to my driver’s licence photo so maybe the snort was an habitual response. Visiting hours were coming to an end and fractious kids, bored with being cooped up all afternoon, were being packed up to go. The room smelt of soiled nappies. But it wasn’t all doom and gloom; in fact, there was a surprising family picnic atmosphere I hadn’t been expecting.

Vex spotted me before I saw her and had a chance to hide any reaction my unexpected appearance might have caused. She stayed seated and waited for me to approach. It’s one of the few defiant exertions of power available to inmates forced to deal with people from the outside. Inside the razor wire-topped nine-metre-high fences, the everyday power struggles between inmates are very real; whether you survive or not depends on your ability to understand and negotiate them. Vex was smaller than I remembered. The level grey eyes were the same, though, the whites, once startling in their healthiness, were now the colour of two-day-old hard-boiled eggs. I recognised the smattering of freckles across her nose. Her innocent look had been a staple of her prostitution work before she was incarcerated. I doubted she would be able to pass herself off as the girl-next-door type any more.

It is oddly deflating sitting opposite the person responsible for your loved one’s death. This prison visit was starting to feel like a mistake, but it was too late to pull out now. I cut straight to the chase. The sooner I was out of here, the better.

‘Why did you send Karen to me?’

Vex raised her eyebrows at my bluntness, but her tone was flat. ‘It’s what you do, isn’t it? Find people? She wanted to find her daughter.’ My eyes were fixed on the filigree of fine lines extending from her eyes to her hairline. How dare she grow old when Niki would be stalled at twenty-one forever. She was aware of me studying her and didn’t seem to mind it one bit.

I forced my attention back to why I had come here. ‘Do you know who killed Karen?’

‘No. Do you?’ she shot back.

It would be public knowledge soon enough but I wasn’t going to be the one to break the news of Justin’s arrest. I forced myself to breathe slowly. If I was going to get anything out of this woman, I had to play it way more softly than this. Before I could come up with my next question she spoke.

‘How’s Sean?’ she asked, going back to first moves, making it clear whose terms this conversation was on. Vex had had dealings with Sean.

I answered honestly. ‘I don’t know.’

She smiled at that. We were both quiet for some time, while she decided what, if anything, she would tell me.

‘You know that Karen turned Christian,’ she said, and glanced around the room. ‘A lot of them do that in here. There’s all sort of benefits.’ She studied one of the guards for a long time before continuing. ‘But with Karen it was the real deal. She went straight; got off the drugs, stayed out of trouble …’ she said, counting off Karen’s achievements on her fingers. Her nails were nibbled to the quick. ‘Believe me, it’s not so easy in here.’

‘When was this?’

‘As soon as she got here. Years ago now. Before my time,’ she said, batting my question away with a swipe of the hand. ‘She was totally infected with the God bug by the time we roomed together.’

If this was true, it was unlikely Karen’s conversion had been a cynical pretence to win back her mother’s approval. Vex read my thoughts.

‘It was real alright. I should know. I had to put up with the endless bloody praying.’

‘Is that how she and Manny met?’

‘Yeah. He visits Christian prisoners. He’s been doing that for years. Well,’ she added slyly, ‘since he got out himself.’

‘What did he serve time for?’

Vex leaned back, arms folded over her breasts. ‘Maybe I should be charging you for this.’

I was about to get up and walk out but she started up again before I had the chance to.

‘Not long after we roomed together she wrote to her mother, asking for her forgiveness. Christians are big on the whole forgiveness thing.’ She couldn’t resist a coy look at look. ‘Me, not so much.’ She was baiting me, but I ignored it. It was just as well Vex wasn’t big on forgiveness. I would never forgive her for killing Niki. Not in this life, or any other. ‘So,’ she continued, relishing the power the role of storyteller gave her, ‘her mum came in to see her and they made up. All was forgiven. Mother and daughter reunited. Alleluia. Then the mum up and died and Karen suddenly has all this money. It was news to her that the mother even had any money. They’d had nothing to do with each other for years. Since before Karen killed the kid, I think. But Karen wasn’t into the money, anyway. She was going to give it up. Her and Manny were going off to live in a Christian commune. What a waste.’

‘You didn’t try for some of that unwanted money yourself?’

‘Sure I did.’ She smiled at me, one corner of her mouth sliding up. ‘I came straight out and asked her for it. Who wouldn’t? She didn’t want it! All I ended up with was a fee for giving her your contact details.’ She laughed out loud at that. ‘There’s a word for that, isn’t there? Irony? Something like that?’

I ignored the gibe. ‘Did Karen get into fights? While she was in here, I mean.’

She gave me a deep look before answering. ‘I didn’t tell anyone about her coming into money. It would have put real heat on me and I didn’t need that kind of shit. All sorts of people would be working me to get my hands on it for—’ again she looked across the room and studied the guard for a long time but the guard appeared to be paying her no attention, ‘—for other people,’ she concluded. ‘But there were rumours about the money. And Karen got the occasional rough-up to see what would shake down, but no more than anyone else really.’ She studied my face. She was on full alert. ‘Why?’



I wasn’t going to tell her about the little bleeds Smithy had found.

‘No reason. I just wondered if she’d made any enemies who might have wanted to have her killed.’

Vex shrugged. If she knew or suspected anyone, she wasn’t going to tell me. ‘Did you find the daughter?’

I hesitated. Was this a trap? Was it possible Vex was the danger to Sunny? I kept my response on safe ground. ‘Karen never got to meet her.’ Vex waggled her head. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was a gesture of sympathy. ‘Did Karen ever talk to you about her husband? Justin.’

‘What about him?’

‘Karen was worried about Sunny. She seemed to think there was some threat to her, but I never got to the bottom of it.’ I waited, thinking she might give me something. Just when I’d given up, she spoke.

‘I used to wonder if it was him who drove the car into the river. Not her. The husband, I mean. She just didn’t seem to have it in her.’ My mouth was suddenly dry. ‘But, you know, when drugs are involved, people can do anything. Only idiots take drugs.’ It was a not so subtle reference to Niki. My sister had been an addict and Vex had been her supplier. She gave me another of those long looks. ‘I asked Karen once.’

‘What did she say?’

Vex shrugged. ‘She said it was her. That she did it.’ She looked around the room. Some of the women returned her gaze. ‘You know, in the men’s prison, they all claim they’re innocent. But not here. No one here says that. We all know what we did.’



No one smiled in response to Vex’s gaze, but the looks they returned to her weren’t threatening either. There was something that passed along the lines of sight between these women; some shared emotion that I couldn’t quite decipher. Vex turned that look directly on me. And that’s when I got it. It was pride. That’s what these women felt; what they communicated with each other. They were proud of what they’d done. ‘Most of us would do it again if we had to,’ Vex said, confirming what I’d sensed. Niki’s silent ghost rose up between us. I swallowed bile. I refused to be baited.

‘Did you believe Karen? When she said she did it?’

Vex looked away from me towards the guard who was now watching her closely. ‘I don’t believe what anyone here tells me.’ It seemed to be aimed at the guard as much as a reference to Karen.

The air outside felt fresh and cold and clean. Since the prison is right on the shoulder of the motorway, that’s saying something. I sucked it in anyway; petrol fumes, sheep truck effluent and all, relishing the freedom of it. Was it possible, as Vex claimed to believe, that it was Justin who had killed Falcon and attempted to kill Sunny and not Karen? Was that why Karen believed Sunny was in danger? Is that what Karen confronted Justin with in Wellington? Is that why Justin killed her?

I was already swinging the car around the last roundabout to the airport, picturing Wolf as I’d left him: gnawing contentedly on the bones I’d picked up for him on the way back from the prison while he waited for Robbie to collect him, when I remembered Norma’s phone was still in the bottom of my overnight bag. In fear of wiping Karen’s message, rather than attempt to dismantle the phone I’d ended up throwing the whole thing in with my luggage. It would be cutting it fine, but I figured there was just enough time, if I got lucky with the lights, to drop the phone off to Inspector Fanshaw at the Wellington police station and still be back at the airport in time to catch my flight.

The uniformed cop behind the desk eyed me suspiciously. It might have been because of my urgency. More likely he was wary of the phone I was handing over, wires and battery pack dangling suspiciously. When I viewed it with the sceptical eye he was trained to look at things with, I had to admit it appeared not dissimilar to a home-made explosive device. He kept his eyes riveted on it as I repeated several times that I wanted him to give the phone to Detective Inspector Aaron Fanshaw and tell him to listen to the message from Karen Mackie that she had left for me on the morning she was killed. He kept asking me to wait right there and refused to even touch the proffered phone. We argued back and forth for a while and things were looking downright ropey until I offered to write my name and address down for him. He visibly relaxed, and handing me a police issue notepad, waited patiently while I wrote on it. It was endearingly naive of him. If this was a bomb I was delivering, it was unlikely to be my real name and number I’d written down.

With the phone delivered, I broke a couple of speed limits getting to the airport and was soon back in the air, struggling with an Anzac biscuit encased in cellophane that was impossible to open. It all felt a bit déjà vu really. But despite the sensation of my stomach falling out of my anus during the roller-coaster takeoff, and despite the migraine-inducing buffeting as the pilot attempted to level out, it was a relief to be back in the air high above Wellington and winging my way back to Auckland.

Though I’d managed quite successfully not to consciously think about what had happened between Robbie and me earlier in the day, in truth the memory of his grin slowly unhitching haunted me.